In a portable electronic device such as a mobile phone, as a method for switching a mode such as a secret mode, a method in which the portable electronic device displays a mode setting screen in accordance with a user's operation and switches the mode in accordance with the user's operation using the mode setting screen is generally used.
However, in order to perform the mode switching using this method, it is necessary for the user to perform an operation of requesting a display of the mode setting screen and further perform an operation of requesting the mode switching. In this manner, time and effort of a user are necessary and a considerable time is necessary to perform the setting because the user needs to perform a plurality of operations.
Therefore, several methods for more simply performing mode switching have been proposed.
For example, a mobile phone disclosed in Patent Document 1 includes a memory unit which holds input data, a secret mode state holding unit which holds a state of a secret mode, a determination unit which determines whether a secret attribute is assigned to the data, and a control unit which controls an operation of each structural component. When the secret attribute is assigned to the data and the content of the secret mode state holding unit is a normal mode, this control unit switches the content of the secret mode state holding unit to the secret mode and prevents the data to which the secret attribute is assigned from being displayed.
Thereby, in the work of collectively moving data from an old-model mobile phone to a new-model mobile phone when the model of the mobile phone or the like is changed, data set by the user as non-display data in the old-model mobile phone can be easily set as the non-display data even in the new-model mobile phone similar to the old-model mobile phone.